The present invention relates to steganography, and more particularly relates to the use of multiple watermarks to determine the authenticity or history of a particular document or electronic object (e.g., image, motion picture, audio track).
Steganographic and digital watermarking technologies are well known. For example see U.S. Pat. No. 5,636,292 and the extensive references cited therein. Also see co-pending patent applications Ser. No. 08/327,426 which was filed Oct. 21, 1994 and co-pending application Ser. No. 08/436,134 which was filed May 8, 1995.
The technology for inserting digital watermarks in images and the technology for reading or detecting digital watermarks in images is well developed, well known and described in detail in public literature. Furthermore, there are commercially available products which include programs or mechanisms for inserting digital watermarks into images. For example the commercially available and widely used products xe2x80x9cAdobe Photoshopxe2x80x9d which is marketed by Adobe Corporation of San Jose Calif. and xe2x80x9cCorel Drawxe2x80x9d program which is marked by Corel Corporation of Ontario Canada, include a facility for inserting digital watermarks into images.
The technology for making high quality copies of documents is widely available. The technical quality of scanners and color printers has been increasing rapidly. Today for a relatively low cost one can purchase a high quality scanner and a high quality color printer. Thus, it is becoming increasingly easy to duplicate documents. The ability to create high quality copies has created a need for technology which can differentiate between original documents and copies of the original.
It is known that watermarks can be used to help differentiate genuine documents from copies. However, the prior art techniques for using digital watermarks to differentiate genuine documents from copies have serious limitations. The present invention is directed to an improved technique for using steganography and digital watermark technology to facilitate differentiating original documents from copies of the original.
The present invention can also be used for various other purposes such as to embed multiple types of information in a single document or to provide watermarks that enable documents to perform special functions.
With the present invention multiple digital watermarks, each of which has a different character, are embedded in a document. The characters of the two watermarks are chosen so that the watermarks will be affected in different manners by what may subsequently happen to the document.
The detection process or mechanism reads the two digital watermarks and compares their characteristics. While wear and handling may change the characteristics of the individual watermarks, the relationship between the characteristic of the two watermarks will never-the-less give an indication as to whether a document is an original or a copy of an original.
For example according to the present invention two digital watermarks in a document may have different energy levels. The absolute energy level of a digital watermark in an original image may be decreased if a document is subject to wear. Likewise the energy level of the digital watermark in an image may be decreased if an image is scanned and reprinted on a color printer. However, the relationship between the energy level of the two digital watermarks will be different in an image that has been subject to wear and in a reproduced image. Likewise if two digital watermarks are introduced into an image where the bit pattern used to construct the digital watermarks have different patterns, the ratio between the signal to noise ratio of the watermarks will be different in an original subject to wear and in a copy generated by scanning the original and printing the scanned image. Other characteristics of multiple digital watermarks can also be used to differentiate original documents from copies.
In other embodiments, a watermark-independent assessment of wear can be performed, and the results used to aid in differentiating original documents from copies.